SATS: simplification aware text summarization of scientific documents

Simplifying summaries of scholarly publications has been a popular method for conveying scientific discoveries to a broader audience. While text summarization aims to shorten long documents, simplification seeks to reduce the complexity of a document. To accomplish these tasks collectively, there is a need to develop machine learning methods to shorten and simplify longer texts. This study presents a new Simplification Aware Text Summarization model (SATS) based on future n-gram prediction. The proposed SATS model extends ProphetNet, a text summarization model, by enhancing the objective function using a word frequency lexicon for simplification tasks. We have evaluated the performance of SATS on a recently published text summarization and simplification corpus consisting of 5,400 scientific article pairs. Our results in terms of automatic evaluation demonstrate that SATS outperforms state-of-the-art models for simplification, summarization, and joint simplification-summarization across two datasets on ROUGE, SARI, and